Compassion for dying street dogs doesn’t come cheap

The stray dog who was looking for a place to die is now being cared for by a vet

I took in three stray kittens when I was living in Phuket, much to the disgust of my landlady who fortunately owed me too much money at the time to do any serious complaining, and I currently have two cats but I’d never tried caring for any canines until last week.

I was driving back to my village when I noticed a puppy sitting in a puddle by the side of the road looking sorry for itself. I wondered if it might have been hit by a car so I walked back to take another look but there didn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with it, except that it was sitting completely still and submerged up to its neck in water.

I found some salami in the fridge which was slightly past its sell by date and tried to get it to eat but it wasn’t interested. Street dogs are pretty much permanently hungry so I immediately knew something was seriously wrong, particularly when the food in question was ravenously wolfed down by the nearby pack of dogs from which the sick puppy had presumably strayed.

What struck me about this dog was how docile it was. Despite having no interest in eating it was happy to be stroked and showed no aggression whatsoever towards me, I’d expect a feral animal to attack any human that tried to touch it but this one was of a pleasant disposition and I came to the conclusion it had crawled into the puddle purely because it wanted to die in a cool place.

If the thing had just growled at me I would have happily left it in the puddle but it seemed happy to see me and that tugged at my heartstrings a bit. I already had half a mind to stick it in the car and take it to the nearest vet and my wife was sufficiently moved by its plight to actually start crying at which point any thoughts I had of ignoring it were abruptly dispelled.

It was completely content to be unceremoniously picked up and stuck in the back of the car. I don’t know to what extent dogs are capable of deep philosophical thought but I wondered if it was under the impression this was normal, that once you start feeling ill and lose your appetite someone will come along and pick you up and put you in a strange vehicle.

The vet knew immediately what the problem was and said the dog would have been dead in a day or two if I’d left it but now had a 50/50 chance of surviving, providing it spent the next week on a drip. That was the good news, the bad news was that the bill was going to run to something in the region of 3,500 Baht (£65 GBP).

This was towards the very top end of the figure I had in mind when calculating the absolute maximum I was willing to pay but it’s one thing to ignore a sick looking stray dog by the side of the road and quite another to pull it out of the vets and dump it back where you found it after finding out how much the treatment is going to cost.

So the dog, which it turns out is a she, is recovering rapidly. She’s still at the vets but has progressed to the tail wagging stage and is no longer at death’s door. This of course creates an entire new set of problems; can I bring myself to stick her back by the side of the road or do we get the street dog inoculated and spayed, at even greater expense, so that she can become become a fully fledged member of the family?

I’m leaning towards the latter scenario although we already have two cats and a baby and my concern is that a puppy will cause all sorts of damage to the house we rent. Perhaps some sort of compromise can be reached whereby she gets fed every single day and sleeps in a bed on the balcony outside but respects the personal space of the cats and never tries to chew any of the furniture.

I’m not sure to what extent stray dogs can be relied upon to respect these type of boundaries, but if this one’s health continues to improve at the current rate I guess we are going to find out.